Some days are the fullness of tongues in excess. I know I ask for more than I deserve and I wish I knew how to help it, how to stop, how to escape, it seems as if this is how I was strung together by a god who should have known better, should have been less cruel and more clever. Some kind of laughter that tastes like wine in a chalice thrown from an angry plastic heaven, still I swallow too ungratefully and crawl inside. I’m not always pretty, I’m not always kind, I’m not always the way light trickles, sparkles, strokes like angel wings falling down my fragile spine. All I ever wanted was to tell you a story that feels like a lover you’ve not yet breathed against but have imagined emerging from the hungry heaving ocean waves for lifetimes, night after night the moon would lust to enter the sea. That’s what these words are if only I could get them right: a shape, a figure, a curve, a dark cavern, a passage into another world where you exist in endless flow, smoothness, salt, and the flavor of chaotic, rhythmic, liquid emotion. Tell me the words are crystal sugar froth, tell me you would wait out eternity to be so torn by a language you’d long since forgotten, but the sparking in your jaw recognizes as truth. And if that story were to move you, stir you, deliver you, take the words, take them, take them, thread them through the bending of your flesh and let the soul you bleed for sleep. Even as I write these my troubled manic thoughts they are fugitives, they are train tracks, they are ship wrecks, they are hopeful dreamer’s dreams. These words I plead for, take them, take them, they are yours.
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Allison Marie Conway 